Asylum Decisions as Performances: Intertextuality in Internal Credibility Assessment

Abstract

This article shows how the Finnish Immigration Service approaches internal credibility assessment in asylum decisions. The internal credibility assessment is one of the most important parts of the asylum process, since it aims to assess the truthfulness of the asylum applicant’s account, customarily through evaluation of the level of detail, coherence, and sense of personal telling. If the account is not accepted as truthful, the applicant may not be granted asylum. In general, the internal credibility assessment is based on the asylum interview documented in the asylum record. The current study analyses 44 asylum decisions and the corresponding interview records to see how the internal credibility assessment is intertextually constructed in the decisions. The article shows that referring to detail seems to be used as a shorthand in the decisions to reject the applicant’s account, since it is used both in cases where the questions of the interviewer have been general, and in cases where the issue seems rather to be one of consistency in either the interview or the decision. The article further shows how the decisions portray the assumptions of the decision maker as more neutral, objective, and credible than those of the asylum applicant. Overall, the article argues that the asylum decisions become performances in which the form and internal argumentation may become more important than the intertextual coherence of the asylum case.